Data privacy laws and trends certainly play a huge role in your growth strategy, but are you factoring it in because you have to (in a reactive way), or are you using it as a primary lever for growth?
The latter is totally possible, so long as you don’t view the limitations and restrictions from data privacy laws as a nuisance.
Here’s how you can use it as a starting point, to boost your growth.
A robust data privacy and protection program can boost your sales by improving customer service and trust, which in turn will play a role in driving customer loyalty and retention, further improving your operational efficiency. Beyond standard onboarding questionnaires, rich data can be collected in the form of effective customer surveys, service rating systems, and giving customers multiple opportunities to share their experiences. This also includes social listening elements. According to reports, 90 percent of consumers will reach out to brands concerning poor customer service via social media channels. This provides a valuable source of customer experience data.
Best part of all is that it will further help you optimize your data, and establish you as a consumer-focused thought leader as you build trust (and loyalty) in your customer base.
That leads me to my next two points, which go over how this very data can be used to drive loyalty and retention—and basically be used as a lever for growth in terms of enhancing strategies, boosting your team’s capabilities, and by extension—their tech stack.
If you’re active across social networks, you surely have come to notice that customers in general gravitate towards companies that are very transparent about their practices. This is why customers are demonstrating their willingness to pay another company more for the same service if the new company displays a commitment to privacy.
Approximately 78 percent of consumers are very concerned about sharing their data with businesses, and nearly 90 percent of consumers believe companies must be more proactive about protecting their sensitive personal information. That’s a huge swath of people who are ready to be ride-or-die customers if a business makes protecting sensitive personal information a priority.
When a company is transparent with its data practices, it’s building a strong foundation built on trust. You can deepen your consumers’ trust by collecting the bare minimum data necessary, justifying any piece of information that needs to be collected, and making sure that your data minimization and retention policies will be sustainable going forward. Convey exactly how they’ll benefit from giving you their data and why you must collect it to run your service. Let them know that by sharing this data, they will get personalized offers tailored to their needs. Sixty-one percent of consumers say they’re more willing to share personal information with an app in exchange for more transparency and control over their data.
Think about it. It’s kind of like how people initially freak out if an eCommerce app requests access to the phone’s camera and photos. Customers would instantly become skeptical, assuming maybe it’s because the app developers are being intrusive. But when the request is followed with messaging like, “...so you can upload photos for visual search to find matching products within seconds…” that’ll be cool!!!
It’s true you can no longer collect huge amounts of data and do whatever you want with it, but it’s also true that this new, privacy-friendly world can improve the reliability and accuracy of the data you do collect. This forces teams to figure out the data that is critical for business operations, which means teams also have to refine and specify the formulas used to build consumer profiles. Thankfully, AI technology exists, to spare growth teams from doing all that heavy lifting, particularly in the form of predictive marketing. 😉
With the help of a predictive AI solution, you can quickly scan your company’s zero party data to receive details about your audience that will help you better understand them and their needs at a personal level. By extension, you can gain insight into the LTV of different customers and cohorts—and that is some really sweet data that can further help you acquire and target loyal subscribers who are more likely to engage with your brand. Just like that, in a matter of weeks, you can increase sales while lowering churn rates.
Many of the cool kids are already taking this approach to amplify their growth. If you’re curious, you can read all about how BoxyCharm (owned by Ipsy), used predictive UA to amplify their FB campaigns which is the largest full size monthly beauty subscription box with over 1M+ subscribers in North America. Amongst many wins, they were able to increase their ROAS by 30% (based on the 12 months view) of Facebook ads by optimizing acquisition campaigns. Results as amazing as theirs can easily be replicated by any sophisticated data driven team that gets on board the predictive UA train!
Companies that have been ahead of the data privacy curve can testify to the gains they’re making with data because of the confidence they have in data protection. Seventy percent of organizations surveyed by Cisco said they have seen “significant” business benefits—including operational efficiency, agility, and innovation—from prioritizing data privacy. There’s no time like the present to wholeheartedly embrace data privacy trends (genuinely, not because you have to) and make it work to your advantage. And if you’re ready to take your growth strategy to the next level for sustainable profitability, you can easily turn to predictive AI. Magic happens when you combine machine intelligence with the human intelligence of your growth team!
Also published here.